


Networking

by GoldsweptSilk (NevillesGran), NevillesGran



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2020-02-06
Packaged: 2021-01-08 03:51:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21229340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NevillesGran/pseuds/GoldsweptSilk, https://archiveofourown.org/users/NevillesGran/pseuds/NevillesGran
Summary: Jon meets other vampires and et cetera persons of London.Most recent chapter: Floyd Matharu.





	1. Simon Fairchild

**Author's Note:**

> One chapter per character, probably, in absolutely no chronological order. First one fits into the timeline...*upside-down shrug emoji*

The host of the party looked old. Not as though he’d been turned as an old man, but as though he’d aged as a creature that couldn’t possibly. His back was bent, his hair receding, his skin gone wrinkled and leathery even from an un-lifetime without sun. His fangs were long and unselfconsciously displayed, and his face was pulled into a shape a little too pointed, a little too narrow, in a way that suggested he was turning very, very slowly into a bat. In support of that illusion, he hovered a few inches above the ground.

“Simon Fairchild,” Jon breathed. Monster of a thousand tales—and an instinctive glance at his mind confirmed the conjecture, introduction on the tip of the antiquarian’s tongue.

Meeting no resistance, Jon looked deeper without a thought—and fell off a cliff of age and power, drowned in a sea of centuries. He reached blindly for anyone, anything, but it was all he could do not to lose his own self in the vast gulf of power. There was no searching for answers, no fighting against the tide-

Someone plucked him effortlessly from sea and returned him to the shore. Jon gasped from habit as he felt his body again, found it being settled into a chair by a bony, iron grip on his arm.

“Easy there, sonny jim,” said Simon Fairchild. “It takes some of you cerebral types like that, the first time you go poking around my head. Best not to try again.”

His tone was of benevolent, almost grandfatherly advice, amused but not cruel.

“Thank you,” Jon said automatically. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

“Oh, of course you did,” said Simon, and patted his shoulder amiably. “But you just keep seated a moment, and maybe we’ll get you something to drink…”

He beckoned to a waiter, with glasses of rich red liquid and their own neck bare, and it was either the lingering vertigo or the casual centuries (millennia?) of power in the command, but it didn’t occur to Jon to protest.

It scarcely mattered—Martin pushed through the not-quite-onlookers, then, the crowd of people pretending not to watch and gossip. Some weren’t pretending very hard, tittering over glasses of…wine.

Martin all but shoved the approaching server to the side, in his haste to drop to his knees beside Jon’s chair.

“Jon! Are you okay? I felt you-” _Did this guy hurt you, do we have to fight our way out_, he asked silently, with a suspicious glare at Simon and all the willingness in the world to follow through.

“I’m fine, Martin. It’s all fine,” Jon said quickly, sitting up straight and sending a rush of reassurance directly to his mind. To Simon, he said, “I am sorry-”

Simon, however, was looking between them with delight. “You brought your own thrall to my party, and then let him loose among the guests?” His eyes twinkled. “Bold, Archivist.”

Before Jon could come up with a reply, defiance or demurral, he turned to Martin directly.

“Tell me, young man,” he asked with unabashed relish, “have you ever dreamed of flying?”

Martin edged a little closer to Jon, looking down and neither baring nor guarding his neck. “Not particularly, sir.”

“Oh, you’re no fun.” Simon pouted, then turned away (still hovering) with a _do-as-you-will_ wave of his hand. “Well, enjoy the festivities, both of you. There’ll be fireworks, later!”


	2. Jude Perry

Jude Perry didn’t look like a vampire. Jude Perry looked like a Southeast Asian woman in her early 30s who had never gotten over punk, except instead of leather and chains, she wore a plain white tank top, black jeans, and a scowl. Minimalist, Jon would have thought wryly, were he not busy being utterly unsettled.

Because she had fangs, red eyes, and skin just a shade too pale and dead-looking—but she lounged in the sun like a savannah cat, and grinned at him with equal comfortable pride. Only her hand extended into the shade where Jon lurked. 

His mind was whirling from what he’d seen in hers, but there were still so many questions. And it was knowledge or death, he knew instinctively, in the world he was now in. Any helping hand could be yanked back in a moment.

“Come on, Archivist,” she taunted, and waggled her fingers. “Just a handshake.”


	3. Michael

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay! I'll try to write more soon.

Jon didn’t know what time it was, or what day, or possibly what month. He knew that he was thirsty. He didn’t know where he was, city or country or alternate dimension, if that was a thing that could be in the terrible world of the supernatural. He knew that he was _thirsty_. He– he _did_ know _who_ he was. He was Jonathan Sims, the Archivist. Nikola called him that, sometimes. When she wasn’t being Jonathan Sims, or sometimes when she was, or sometimes when she was being someone else. Or someone else was being Nikola.

He knew that he was thirsty. He knew that he was so, so thirsty. There’d been some blood last...long time ago. Someone. Probably a someone. Maybe a something. It had been difficult to hold on to, with the chains and the cage bars, and he hadn’t gotten nearly enough before Nikola pulled it away.

A door opened and he crouched back because the laugh that came with the light was Nikola’s—but he also leaned forward, because maybe she had something—some_one_, _anything—_to drink.

“This _also_ isn’t the real ritual space,” she trilled, lighting up the room with a sweep of her arm. “I can’t give away _all_ our secrets, you know, especially when you haven’t really _agreed_ to anything yet. _Liar._” She hip-checked her companion with a giggle and a wink visible across the museum hall. “But I know you’re here for the main attraction anyway.”

She was across the floor in an instant, yanking Jon forward by the chain that trailed out of his cage and posing like a ringmaster with a lion. She was dressed for it, like always, in the body she seemed to prefer as Nikola—something between a circus girl and a plastic mannequin.

“Behold, a rare hobbled Archivist!” she cried, then leaned forward and added in a stage whisper, “I’m going to drain _all_ his blood into a _big_ spell to end the world as we know it!”

She and her guest were a study in compare/contrast. She was short and not quite correctly proportioned; he was tall and not quite correctly proportioned. She dressed like she had bought her costume complete from a thrift shop specializing in circus wear; his thrift shop had been more eclectic, and he had picked out the clothes not just in the dark but while deaf and insensate as well. She had a smile like a spotlight and energy like any second, she was going to spin into a pirouette with a dislocated-knee kick that would snap your neck. His smile was a blinking Cheshire cat’s and he jittered like he could clip through the floor at any moment.

He _looked_ like Michael, and smelled like him, but Jon had learned to stop trusting faces in the Circus of the Strange.

“Oh, Archivist.” He sounded like Michael, too—grinning without an ounce of sympathy. “That does’t sound fun for you at all.”

His hand snaked between the bars to catch Jon’s chin with too-thin fingers and too-sharp nails. His smile twisted like crashing cars. “But _very_ fun for me.”

Jon lunged for his wrist—not rage just _thirst_; the blood smelled like Novacaine but it was _right there. _But he was chained and starving and had had a headache since...forever. Michael yanked his hand away, nails dragging along Jon’s throat as he left. He sucked on one finger that Jon had _barely_ scraped, blood not a millimeter away.

“Did he get you?” asked Nikola, and without waiting for an answer yanked on the chain again, dragging Jon to the floor. “Naughty Archivist!”

“It’s alright,” Michael laughed. His echoed in a way even Nikola’s didn’t. “Yes, I _do_ like his plan. Let’s talk about the end of the world!”

Hours, days...some thirsty, starving eternity later, Jon found himself in a room. It was definitely a room. It was a bit like his bedroom, sparsely painted and slightly clean, and mostly like his office, windowless and every free inch of wall space filled with filing cabinets and shelves of research.

“Goodness, Archivist, you really are a kept man, aren’t you?”

There was a desk that was also a bed that was also a race car and a door, and Michael lounged on it like it was a piano, looking around with the disdain of a cat.

He smiled brightly at Jon’s discomfort, showing off too many teeth. “Of course, I suppose a healthy work-life balance was out of the question!”

Jon _was_ discomforted, particularly as the walls seemed to waver with Michael’s laughter, the lines of the shelves spiraling out of control. But he also found himself thinking more clearly than he had in...weeks? Yes, weeks, though no more than two. Three?

“This is a dream,” he said slowly, but more sure of it as he spoke. “That’s what you do - that’s what your kind specializes in, isn’t it? Dreams.”

“Oh, _very_ good!” Michael hopped off the desk, eyes even brighter and limbs even more unnaturally twisting than in the waking day. “Unfortunately, I’ve decided to kill you.”

“Wh– what?” Jon stepped back.

“I’m going to kill you!” Michael spun gleefully and the room spun with him, inside and out. Jon kept his feet, but for a moment they might have been his hands.

“Why?” he managed.

Michael sopped abruptly, though the room kept going. “Because I don’t want the Circus to win, but I don’t want the Archive to win, either. Killing you myself—it’s the best of both worlds.” He tapped his chin with one long finger. “And, of course, there’s revenge.”

“Revenge?” Jon sputtered. “I still barely know who you are!”

“I am Michael,” Michael said pleasantly, except for how the room spun.

“You’re...you were Gertrude’s assistant.” 

“No.”

"But—the tape. I heard you.”

As he spoke—as he focused on his own memory of Michael Shelley’s voice—the office shifted around them. The desk was the same; the old stone walls and filing cabinets from 1920. But the positions shifted, the books on the shelves were different, the papers on the desk were still utterly unorganized but in a subtly different way, not Jon’s disorder but—

An old woman sat behind the desk whom Jon had met at an office party once or twice. Her hair was tied back in a messy bun; her gaze sharper than he remembered. It dulled somehow at a knock on the door—open, suddenly, behind him; Jon whirled to see a human Michael Shelley poke his head in and—

The dreamwalker shoved him against a filing cabinet with a snarl and a crash, his hand around Jon’s throat. His nails were still sharp, and Gertrude Robinson disappeared—the desk disappeared, the shelves and books and comfortable clutter. Only the bloody claws at Jon’s throat remained. (He was _so_ _**thirsty**._)

“Quiet, Archivist,” the monster called Michael crooned. “The Circus will be watching for _your _sort of games. Best to let _me_ choose the mindscape, if you want to live.”

“You already said you were going to kill me.” Jon didn’t gasp, because he didn’t need to breathe. But being strangled still made it difficult to talk, in the swirling void of mirrors. 

“So I did!” Michael’s smile reflected around them for aeons.

“At least tell me _why_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check out ["Severance Package"](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/The_Magnusquerade/works/22191820) by [Turbulent_Muse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Turbulent_Muse/pseuds/Turbulent_Muse) for Michael's story!


	4. Annabelle Cane

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time...unknown. S4??

The woman who turned around to face Jon on the escalator was perfectly average, globally. About 5'3", dark hair, Chinese ancestry but probably not totally. She looked dressed for a day at a semi-casual office—definitely pricier and more white collar than global average, but this was a tube station in central London, in the thick of the morning commute.

"Archivist," she said, and smiled warmly. "So nice to meet you at last. Can I call you Jon?"

Jon didn't have room to stumble back. His mind flicked out before he could stop it, but the crowd was too great; he yanked it back with a sharp intake of breath, before he ended up a quivering mess on the ground (again.) It wasn't enough to read anything from the woman—but the breath was, even with the cacophony of scents. She didn't smell of anything but human.

"Who are you?" he demanded, and tried to catch her eyes at least. That was a safe connection; he could get a glance, at least, maybe even charm—

She didn't even try to avoid his gaze. Her eyes were wide and guileless, and the thoughts that moved them were not her own. Jon could see it as though from very far away and underwater, and the flood that threatened was the morning rush at Oxford Circus. 

"Why Jon, don't you know?"

"Annabelle Cane."

He looked around manually, but of course he couldn't see her. He didn't even know what she looked like, or how far the range was on Web possession. They were almost at the top of the escalator—escape, or ambush?

The woman Annabelle Cane was puppetting smiled sweetly. "Oh, Jon, don't worry. The Mother of Puppets has long been allied with the Magnus Institute. You've just been making such a name for yourself recently, I thought it was time we met in person." The way her smile showed teeth was genuinely amused, but not unthreatening. "In a manner of speaking."

"What do you want," Jon said flatly.

"Just to offer a party invitation. Hilltop House—you know the one. Friday the 21st." She tilted the woman's head sideways, eyes lidded seductively, neck bared. "Refreshments provided, of course."

They reached the top of the escalator. The woman, facing backwards, tripped on it. Jon lunged forward reflexively and she overbalanced right into his arms, her cardioid artery a hair's breath from his lips. From his teeth. The scent of her perfume was floral; her blood promised to be much sweeter. Jon hadn't eaten since yesterday; everything else was very distant.

'Consider this an early gift basket, if you'd like," Annabelle murmured. "I don't believe she has many who'll miss her."

They were still standing at the top of the escalator, in rush hour at a Central London Tube station. Someone shoved past Jon from behind and he dropped the woman like a jug of holy water.


	5. Floyd Matharu

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RIP to this guy (he survives, he's fine)

_Weirdos. Kinda like—no, don't think about that._

Jon turned. “Excuse me?”

“Yeah?” The sailor looked back at him, and more flashes of familiarity slipped through the man’s mind before he managed to squash them. Pale skin, red eyes, blood and salt at sea—

“Jon?” Basira called from behind him.

“You used to work for Salesa.”

“What? You— I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The stench of fear started to roll off him, sweat and adrenaline and a pounding heart (pumping rich blood, and Jon hadn’t eaten yet tonight…)

“Mikaele Salesa. You used to work on his ship.”

“I don’t know you.” But the image came to his mind anyway: Salesa, tall and broad and somehow squirrely despite that; human trader of cursed and magical objects.

“Jon…”

Jon ignored her.

“But I know you. Floyd Matharu. Served on the Dorian from 2011 to 2014. With Salesa.”

Floyd had tried to suppress the memories, but it was so easy to peer into his mind and dig them back up. Easier still when he caught Floyd’s gaze and _pushed_, just a little, let the power spill out of eyes that he knew had turned the bright red of fresh blood. Floyd’s blood ran the same bright color, even as his heart rate slowed and he went slack under Jon’s will.

“Jon, I’m not sure about this—”

“But I am.” And he was hungry, and it was the easiest thing of all to tilt Floyd’s head to the side, let his fangs slide out, and bite.

Salesa, the island, the broken camera, the Thing in the water…Jon drank them in with the blood, and it was all sweet. When he was done—when he was sated, and sure that Floyd knew nothing else of import—he pulled away.

“Thank you.” He wiped his bloody lips on one sleeve. “You can go, now.”

“What– what?”

Jon’s hand had slid from Floyd’s neck to his shoulder; he lifted it to pat the man reassuringly and Floyd swayed without the support.

“Thank you, Floyd,” Jon repeated, and plucked the memory of the last few minutes from his mind, replacing it with some innocent questions from a passenger. It was simple—not just recent but hazy and charmed; it all but belonged to Jon already.

“You were very helpful,” he added, with a deliberate surge of gratitude like he would offer Martin after a feeding. “You just…need a break.”

“I…”

A very small part of Jon whispered that the man was still _his_, for all intents and purposes; his mind still quiescent in Jon’s grip and plenty of blood left in his veins… Who would miss a single sailor? If drinking until Jon was sated felt this good, what about drinking until the last wisp of life passed his lips?

“Just go rest up, and drink some water.” Jon turned the man around and nudged him gently in the right direction (the direction of the shiphands’ cabins found easily in his mind.) “I’m sure you’ll feel better when you wake up for your next shift.”

Floyd nodded obediently, and walked away on shaky legs.

Basira waited until the sailor was out of sight to snap at him. “What the hell was that?”

“He had information about Salesa.” Jon might have felt tired, exasperated, but instead he was coasting on the vivacity of fresh blood. He tried to keep it out of his voice. “I thought it would help.”

“Is that why you chose _this_ ship?”

“I wasn’t sure. Just a hunch.”

“You had to drink from him, too?” she added snidely. “Whatever happened to ‘consensual thralls only’?”

“Martin and Melanie aren’t— Without Tim, with only two, I’m— _You’re_ the one who said I need to be ready for Ny-Alesund. ‘Full strength’, I believe were your words.” He licked a last drop of blood from his fangs, and drew them back to just a little longer than a human’s. “Floyd helped.”

**Author's Note:**

> My real kink is monsters so old and terrible that they have no reason not to just be friendly. 
> 
> Got a favorite line? Comment! I'll take requests for the next vampire to meet...


End file.
